Microsoft on Tuesday announced new strategic partnerships with Nvidia and the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, the latest sign that the company is working to reduce its dependence on OpenAI.
As part of the agreement, Microsoft will invest $5 billion into Anthropic, while Nvidia will invest $10 billion into the startup. Anthropic has committed to purchasing $30 billion of Azure compute capacity from Microsoft and has contracted for additional compute capacity up to one gigawatt, according to a blog post.
"This is a dream come true for us," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a video on Tuesday. "You know, we've admired the work of Anthropic and Dario for a long time, and this is the first time we are going to deeply partner with that Anthropic to accelerate Claude."
Nvidia and Anthropic are collaborating to "support Anthropic's future growth" for the first time, the blog post said. The companies will work together on engineering and design to optimize Anthropic's models for performance and efficiency, and optimize Nvidia architectures for Anthropic's specific workloads.
The companies said Anthropic's compute commitment will initially be up to one gigawatt of compute capacity with Nvidia's Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell systems.
Microsoft has invested billions of dollars into Anthropic's rival OpenAI, backing the company as early as 2019. OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit research lab in 2015, but has become one of the fastest-growing commercial entities on the planet in recent years following the launch of its ChatGPT chatbot.
OpenAI completed a recapitalization last month, and Microsoft formally outlined its partnership with the startup. Microsoft holds an stake in OpenAI's for-profit business that is valued at $135 billion, or roughly 27% of the company on an as-converted diluted basis.
Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI research executives, including its CEO Dario Amodei, in 2021. It's best known for developing a family of large language models called Claude
"As an industry, we really need to move beyond any type of zero sum narrative or winner take all hype," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in the video. "What's required now is the hard work of building broad, durable capabilities together so that this technology can deliver real, tangible local success for every country, every sector and every customer. The opportunity is simply too big to approach any other way."
Nvidia is scheduled to report third-quarter earnings on Wednesday.
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